I adored Budgie precisely because it was still on X11 🥲

Anyway, for a relatively simple and clean holistic GNOME-that’s-not-GNOME, it’s a very polished desktop. Worth checking out for your F&F.

The need to think about and deal with snaps is the reason I don’t recommend Ubuntu to noobs in general. It’s confusing and unnecessary and adds to the frustration of being forced to make judgement calls about things you don’t want to understand just to do your thing (we have enough of that as it is). And if you do decide against snaps, it’s a bit of an uphill battle and it’s easy to start feeling that the OS, like what they came from, is antagonistic. Canonical decided to isolate and take control of part of the Ubuntu ecosystem with snaps and that has made the distro a bit more niche compared to before.

For better or worse Ubuntu is also known to be on the edge with new developments on the desktop. Switching to new shiny desktop environments between major versions, being very early on Wayland-first, etc. Having to learn new OS UI after an upgrade is not ideal if you are not an enthusiast.

Other than that, Ubuntu can be a fine distro, both for server and desktop. If you either accept the particularities like snaps or know how to work around them, it can be a very good experience and it’s well-maintained in general. But it’s less of a no-brainer and more situational if it’s appropriate or not.

Like Alpine or Gentoo: Great distros but for different reasons not anything I would recommend a non-technical Linux virgin to replace their Windows or macOS with.

Good first distros for beginners:

• Linux Mint Debian Edition
• EndeavourOS
• Debian
• Pop! OS
• Fedora Workstation

Not Good first distros but still getting picked up by people who don’t know:

• Manjaro
• Ubuntu
• Omarchy
• Zorin
• Garuda

Everyone: If you’ve only used one of the latter, try another distro before you believe “Desktop Linux is not ready” or “Linux is not for me”.

Specifically on Steam: Which hardware you run on can affect on which distro it runs out of the box on and if you need to fiddle with drivers and firmware or not to get things running smoothly. There is also some difference between installation methods (some people swear by the flatpak version and others swear off it).

Maybe also check the health of your SSD and that your firmware/BIOS are up to date.

In this case they are apparently fine with a personal computer being used

Where? Looks ambiguous. From all we know this is a work computer provided by the employer. It’s more likely to be an oversight or deprioritized/neglected.

which makes RDP actually a slightly more secure solution

I do not see how that folllows.

If both the company and employee are indeed fine with the RDP, it should be no problem to get that confimed from IT in writing.

Separate your personal and work computer

nods enthusiastically
Important for security of both the employee and the company. Don’t mix business and pleasure. It’s the only thing that makes sense!

Put Windows and all work related software on a separate work laptop and use remote desktop from your Linux PC to do your job.

What? No! Keep them separate! This is how people get pwned. Don’t backdoor your employers machine from your personal PC or vice versa!

dnf --cacheonly

zsh envy is dead

What would your father say? Real fathers use real startx.

slock

I really hope the X11 session stays maintained.

Otherwise, KDE will finally have a reason to get get its MATE/Cinnamon equivalent

What should the fork be called? Surely someone can do better than “Plaxma DE”.

The first one I think is a fundamental limitation in that display preferences by default is per-user. Maybe this makes it work for you? https://feddit.online/post/1350756/comment/6636228

The 24h clock might be similar - check your system-wide locale.

deleted by creator

Supposedly both the display manager and greeters have system-wide configuration for this purpose, however. And the issue with notifications and DE overlays are present post login, too.

Did you look this up?

What do you think is more likely - that KDE Neon does not have a testing version of Plasma Login Manager or that a sensationalistic news headline is not giving you a 100% accurate and complete understanding?

Things I’ve run into:

1. Out of the box, the lock screen comes on after screen unblanking - late enough that when things aren’t snappy you can briefly catch the desktop without reauthing.

2. Sometimes randomly after wake, keyboard input is not recognized in the password field at all. Except for Esc, which in this state appears to crash-restart it and makes it work again

3. With a multi-monitor setup, I have still not been able to properly force the primary monitor. Is an issue because things like notifications and the login input will only show up on a usually turned off projector. This one might be PEBCAK.

I have issues 1 and 3 with XFCE on lightdm, too, though.

Are you able to try it with other SATA drive models?

Are there any relevant BIOS Settings like “legacy USB” that could make a difference? Do you have the latest firmware for the motherboard?

It works. Go ahead, try it.

but is this currently the case

sorry, is what the case?

The expected payout is negative so no, not similar to investing. It becomes the opposite, pretty much.

💁🦋

I think that might be the same RK3588 chip as the Bananapi M7 which I did a write-up on last year. Trying a different kernel might help with your issue - it did for me.

https://blog.kumio.org/posts/2025/01/bananapim7-hvm.html#kernel-versions

I should probably update the table for trixie.